[xubuntu-users] Fwd: Re: Misaligned Windows in the Interface

[Jack Fromm]

On 09/07/2012 01:07 AM, Mike Kupfer wrote:
> Jack Fromm wrote:
>
>> I forgot to mention one other symptom. Alt-F4 doesn't work.
> [...]
>> I thought it was just me. I developed the same problem the other night.
>> I've been on 12.04 since May and it worked fine until then. In addition
>> to the problems John describes, applications open on my secondary
>> monitor and I can't move them. Not only that, but they don't show an
>> icon on the panel like an open app should. Finally, when I go into
>> Settings Manager, both Window Manager and Window Manager Tweaks are
>> completely blank when I open them.
> Jack, in your case, it sounds to me like the Xfce window manager (xfwm4)
> is not running for some reason.
>
> If you can get a terminal window, see if "pgrep xfwm4" prints anything.
> If it does not, try running "xfwm4 &" and see if that fixes things.
>
> I don't recognize the symptoms that John Deakin reported, but it
> wouldn't hurt for him to try these steps, too.
>
> If manually starting xfwm4 fixes things for you, make sure you save your
> session so that you have xfwm4 the next time you log in.
>
> mike
>
Mike,

Thanks very much for the suggestions. I would have liked to try them out 
just so I could have nailed down the cause of the issue. Unfortunately, 
I have resolved it but I still am not sure what the root cause was. I 
don't think it was as simple as John's. It lasted over several days and 
nothing I did fixed it so I decided to bite the bullet and do a bare 
metal restore from a two-week old backup. Things were okay after the 
restore (although I did have to redo all my  panel customizations).  
Then I ran the 70+ updates that had happened in those two weeks.  That 
brought the problem back. I did another restore from backup and this 
time I ran the updates in two passes --- all the minor ones first, then 
the seven related to a kernel upgrade.  When things were still okay 
after the reboot, I re-did my panel tweaks.  Been okay since.

If it happens again, I will be sure to try your suggestions.

Thanks again,
Jack